Why fakes and counterfeit pasts are fascinating

A couple of things last week have got me thinking about an old fascination of mine – fakes and ideas of authenticity. My angle – some notions of authentic reality and truth can be quite mischievous and misleading! And lying can be liberating! It started in the Washington Post – Sure, It’s Real! Real Fake…

archaeology, Classics and contemporary art – the connections

The interest in the decision to cancel a Stanford acquisition of Dennis Oppenheim’s sculpture “Device to root out evil” is growing.[Link] [Link] Yesterday and today the New York Times has been pressing for interviews and comment – Is this censorship? What does the decision say about Stanford’s commitment to the arts? How does the art…

augmenting past realities – and a connection with artificial intelligence

How should we reconstruct the past? Is the ideal Virtual Reality and photorealistic simulation? A CGI (pre)history? Under the supposition that this would be like it was back then? My line is that this would be the death of the past. It forgets the material ruin, the archaeological condition that is our cultural and historical…

forensic archaeology

At the scene of crime anything might be relevant. An item today from The Scotsman Sue Black was a teenage schoolgirl in Inverness when Renee MacRae and her son Andrew vanished in November, 1976. Yesterday, the renowned forensic anthropologist was back near her home city hoping to help solve one of Scotland’s most enduring mysteries…